At her Washington DC concert on September 27, 2022, musician and pop superstar Lizzo played a 200-year-old crystal flute that once belonged to James Madison onstage in front of an audience of thousands. While living in the White House, Madison continued to own and operate his Montpelier plantation in Virginia, where he enslaved over 300… Read more →
With Roe v Wade upended, the balance of power and authority among lawmakers, medical practitioners, and pregnant and birthing people is suddenly in flux. And at the center of the storm, the safety and autonomy of those carrying (and losing) pregnancies is in jeopardy. Historical investigations into troubled pregnancies and births, therefore, are salient and… Read more →
In December 2022 – a few days shy of the new year – the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee (MMMRC) and Department of State Health Services released a joint Biennial Report on maternal mortality and morbidity rates in the state. They use term “maternal mortality” to describe the death of a childbearing person… Read more →
We spent all of winter in the NICU. When I was 25 weeks pregnant, I went into preterm labor and gave birth to my daughter. She weighed just one pound 13 ounces and was barely one foot long. Having a micropreemie in the NICU feels like an alternate reality. Time stops working the way one… Read more →
Karen Weingarten is a regular contributor to Nursing Clio and Associate Professor of English at Queens College, CUNY. She has just published a new book titled Pregnancy Test and is the author of Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice, 1880- 1940. Lara: How did you get interested in researching the history and culture… Read more →
For most of last year, I worried that I’d broken my brain. As an academic whose job entails creating knowledge, this was utterly terrifying. I could still write, but getting words on the page was difficult and painfully slow. As I tried to rehab my writing muscles, I realized I’d missed a key warning sign…. Read more →
It’s been 10 years since archaeologists discovered Richard III’s skeleton under a parking lot in Leicester, England. But historians haven’t yet rewritten Richard’s biography to include this medieval English king’s experience with disability.[1] The 2012 discovery of Richard III’s skeleton confirmed his physical disability as historical fact, upending the certainties of earlier scholars who thought… Read more →
On a Thursday morning in 1726, French colonial officials in Pondichéry – France’s principal colonial holding on India’s southeastern coast – received word that a dead body had been discovered at the bottom of a well. The governor of Pondichéry dispatched three officials to investigate the report. The officials quickly located the body and identified… Read more →